IRISH INCONSEQUENCE.
WE should be very sorry to think that the Freeman's Journal was correct in stating that the Nationalist Members who voted against the Address in the Commons on Monday last had the Irish nation at their back. So far as we have been able to ascertain, the attitude of Ireland as a whole during the past week has certainly failed to bear out this sweeping assertion. The repre- sentative organs of the three chief factions—Dillonite, Redmondite, and Healyite—have certainly shown an unwonted unanimity in their efforts to minimise the sig- nificance of the loyal demonstrations evoked by the Jubilee. They have pronounced the decorations in Dublin to be meagre and inadequate, and they have made the most of the sporadic ebullitions of disloyalty which have manifested themselves in certain quarters. But even if we refrain from supplementing our information from Unionist sources, and concentrate our attention exclu- sively on the manifestations of irreconcilable Hibernian patriotism, we shall hardly be justified in regarding Ireland in the light of the skeleton at the feast. The protest of the Nationalist Members itself lost a good deal of its point from the divergent attitude of the Dillonite and Redmondite sections, to say nothing of the presence of some of their number in the Members' stand at Westminster on the following day. Across the Channel the results of the anti-Jubilee agitation were practically confined to a town-and-gown row in Dublin, to an appeal to the people of Kilrush to shutter their shops, and to grotesque "funeral processions" in Limerick and Skibbereen. The most heroic achievement of all was perhaps that of the patriot who scaled the statue of King William in College Green, and in response to the cries of the mob, "Break him up," vigorously pummeled the head of the statue with his fists. In "rebel Cork," beyond the furtive hoisting of a black flag—hauled down almost as soon as it was run up—there seems to have been absolutely no effort to interfere with the demonstrations of the loyalists, while bonfires blazed merrily in many parts of the county. The only speakers who seem to have risen to the occasion were Miss Maude Gonne and Mr. John Daly. At the risk of seeming =chivalrous we respectfully decline to take the former seriously ; as for the latter, he has already suffered the fate of Jonah at the bands of the very politicians who hailed him as a martyr on his release from gaol. No; if the Nationalists are serious in their desire to promote a recrudescence of Anglophobia, they must improve upon their recent efforts. As matters stand, they have only succeeded in conveying an impression of their uneasy apprehension lest their compatriots, if let alone, should have succumbed to their innate love of " divarsion," and joined whole-heartedly in a celebration which Irishmen have done so much to render possible, and in which Ireland was so splendidly represented last Tuesday. The most prominent and popular figures in the Procession, always excepting the Queen herself, were all Irishmen,—Lord Wolseley, Lord Charles Beresford, and Lord Roberts. The last-named, as he rode by himself in the Colonial Procession on his famous grey Arab—wearing the medals bestowed on it for its services in the field—met with a reception all along the route second only in enthusiasm to that bestowed on the central figure. And here we may add, on the authority of the London correspondent of the leading Parnellite paper, that at no point of the six miles of streets which the Queen traversed did her Majesty receive such an enthusiastic greeting as from the windows of the London office of the Freeman's Journal. It is only right to explain that they had been sold to one of the Jubilee seats agents. This is not the first time that Irish patriots have shown themselves emulous of the action of the Israelites in spoiling the Egyptians.
The spectacle of Ireland, ready, if only her political guides would let her, to share in this great public act of homage to the Queen, while those same guides lend countenance by their presence to the very celebration which they condemn, is a fairly striking specimen of that strange inconsequence and inconsistency which is at once the charm and the curse of the Celtic tem. perament. It is a trait which finds expression in all kinds of incongruities of thought and speech anel action, and constantly reduces the matter - of - fact Saxon to a state of bewilderment. We see it stated—in a Nationalist paper—that the late Captain Boycott, the earliest victim of the system to which he gave his name, was a Home-ruler. Daniel O'Connell's last surviving son, who passed away a few days ago, was a Unionist. And Daniel O'Connell himself, as the present generation may need to be reminded, was not debarred by his political opinions from cherishing a deep personal reverence for the Queen, a reverence which found touching expression in one of his letters. It is idle to speculate on what a man would have done had he lived in another age ; but at least we feel tolerably sure that O'Connell would not have availed himself of an occasion like the present to accuse the Queen of "callous neglect" of his countrymen, or have- attempted to hold her responsible for the higher per- centage of deaf-mutes and lunatics in Ireland over those in other portions of the United Kingdom. Efforts like these, reminding one in their logic of the queries in. " R,..jected Addresses "—" Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise ? Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies ? " — illustrate the straits to which Nationalist leader-writers have been reduced of late to stimulate the waning animosities of their clien- tele. But in these animosities personal hostility to the Queen has never at any time played a serious part. The Irish have, as a nation, always entertained most cordial feelings to the Royal Family, and have regarded the rarity of their visits and the lack of a Royal residence in the light of a grievance. Ten years ago, at the time of the Jubilee of 1887, copies of the facsimile letter addressed by the Queen to her people were greatly in request, not merely among loyalists, but among the constituents of Nationalist Members, and he would be a bold man who ventured to assert that Ireland had. grown more disloyal since the death of Mr. Parnell, the eclipse of Mr. William O'Brien, and the decline of a compact and well-organised campaign into a squalid squabble over the conflicting claims of rival "bosses."
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